Tag: Masses and Mainstream (periodical)

Very few members of the general public
remember him now, but in his time Herbert Aptheker (1915 – 2003)
was a very big deal indeed, and to this day he is a revered figure in
the academy. He is considered a pioneer in the historical study of
slavery in America – more broadly, in the general history of black
Americans, and, more narrowly, in the history of slave revolts.

But he was not just a scholar. He was a
devout Communist. David Horowitz called him “the Communist Party’s
most prominent Cold War intellectual.” J. Edgar Hoover once said
that the FBI considered Aptheker “the most dangerous Communist in
the United States.” In 2015, Harvey Klehr, the historian of
American Communism and of Soviet spying in the US, described
him as “an ideological fanatic who squandered his talents as a
historian, gave slavish devotion to a monstrous regime, and lacked
the intellectual courage to say publicly what he wrote privately.”

Harvey Klehr

Indeed, as Klehr noted, Aptheker
“joined the American Communist party (CPUSA) in August 1939, after
the Nazi-Soviet pact, just as thousands of other disillusioned Jewish
Communists were leaving.” And good Stalinist that he was, he
parroted Uncle Joe’s calls for peace with Germany and, when the
Nazis violated the pact in 1941 by invading the USSR, immediately
reversed his position, calling for the US to fight shoulder to
shoulder with the USSR and UK.

Aptheker’s whole adult life revolved around the CPUSA. As a student he was active in CPUSA front organizations, taught at the CPUSA’s New York Workers School, and was a regular reader of the CPUSA’s Daily Worker and New Masses and a contributor to other CPUSA rags. After the war, in which he fought on the European front, Aptheker settled in the American South, becoming an “education worker” (which is something like a “community organizer”) and working for yet another CPUSA front. From 1948 to 1953 he was a staffer at the CPUSA’s literary journal, Masses and Mainstream; from 1953 to 1963 he edited the CPUSA’s ideological monthly, Political Affairs; and from 1957 to 1991, he was a member of the CPUSA’s national committee, on which he was considered was the party’s leading “theoretician.”

Aptheker, Hayden, and other Hanoi travel companions

While the USSR lasted, nothing shook
his devotion to it. He was always prepared to defend Stalin’s
atrocities, and when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, he wrote a
book justifying the invasion. He also penned a defense of the 1968
invasion of Czechoslovakia. If the Kremlin was incapable of doing
anything of which Aptheker would not approve, the U.S., in his view,
could do no right. For him, the Marshall Plan amounted to
“renazification.” And of course the Vietnam War was, in his eyes,
a pure act of imperialist aggression. In 1966 he and Tom Hayden –
the California radical who was then Jane Fonda’s husband – made
“solidarity” trips to Hanoi and Beijing.

Eldridge Cleaver

In 1966, while remaining a CPUSA
stalwart, Aptheker ran for Congress as a member of the Peace and
Freedom Party, whose candidate for president of the U.S., two years
later, was Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader and convicted
rapist who would later become involved in a shootout with Oakland
police and flee the country to escape a murder rap.

Eugene Genovese

Under the pro-Marxist dispensation on post-Vietnam American campuses, Aptheker’s academic career thrived: he taught at Bryn Mawr, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, at CUNY, at Yale, at Berkeley, and at Humboldt University in Berlin. Yet he should never have been considered a serious historian: he consistently twisted or suppressed or invented facts to suit his ideological purposes. (Recall that a habit of focusing on the worst of America, including its history of slavery, was a key CPUSA activity.) Klehr acknowledges that “Aptheker deserves credit as a pioneer in the field of African-American studies,” but notes that “his work later came under sustained attack by far more accomplished historians who argued that he had overemphasized the significance of slave revolts and misjudged the militancy of most slaves. Even his fellow Marxist, Eugene Genovese, who praised Aptheker and sought to integrate him into the historical profession, offered a devastating critique of his thesis.”

Bettina Aptheker

Aptheker did not quit the CPUSA until after the Soviet Union had fallen, leaving him without a lodestar. To be sure, once the USSR was dead, and exposed to the world as, indeed, an Evil Empire, he felt obliged to cough up a few public recriminations, admitting, for example, that the CPUSA (contrary to his decades-long claims) had always been controlled and funded by the Kremlin. “In short,” wrote Klehr, “he confirmed much of what the ‘right-wing reactionaries’ had said about the CPUSA and the Soviet Union for decades.”

There was more.
After his death, in 2003, it emerged that this man who had spent most
of his life celebrating a monstrous tyranny had himself, in his
private life, been a monster: his daughter, Bettina, in a memoir,
revealed that he had sexually abused her from the time she was a
three-year-old toddler until she was thirteen years old.